Archives for November 2024

Adam Zagajewski:  A Defense of Ardor. Claire Cavanaugh translation. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2004. First published in Poland in 2004.

 

A Pole who has lived in what was West Berlin (“a peculiar synthesis of the old Prussian capital” with a frivolous “fascination” with “Manhattan and the avant-garde”), Paris (“one of the few European metropolises to possess the secret of eternal youth,” although no longer the intellectual capital it had been in the previous generation), and Houston (“computers, highways, and crude oil but also wonderful libraries and a splendid symphony”), Adam Zagajewski likens himself to “a passenger on a small submarine that has not one periscope but four: Polish tradition, German literature, French culture (“with its penetrating intelligence and Jansenist moralism”), and the Anglo-American “literature of specifics passion, and conversation,” of Shakespeare, Keats, and Robert Lowell. He regrets to report that wherever he has lived, he has encountered a mood of cool irony, a refusal of the ardor with which literature, music, and painting are made. 

In an earlier generation, Thomas Mann’s irony made sense. “The author of Buddenbrooks saw Nazism and fascism as a return to the energies of the mythic world, to the destructive violence of archaic myths, and hoped to resist this great wave of terror with the soothing humanist irony.” Today’s irony “expresses rather a disillusionment with the collapse of utopian expectations, an ideological crisis provoked by the erosion and discrediting of those visions that hoped to replace the traditional metaphysics of religious faith with eschatological political theories,” most especially Marxism. But recurrence to the conservatism of T. S. Eliot, as some propose, will not suffice, “blind” as it is “to the phenomenal (and fragile) benefits we derive from liberal democracy.” Using irony as a weapon, some contemporary authors “flog consumerist society,” others religion, and “still others do battle with the bourgeoisie.” In doing so, however, they release the imp of the perverse, the all-too-perverse. “Too long a stay in the world of irony and doubt awakens in us a yearning for different, more nutritious fare.” 

What would that be? Zagajewski recommends Plato’s Symposium, with its speech by Diotima “on the vertical wanderings of love,” the eros or ardor by which the soul ascends toward what is worthy of the soul and its ardor: what is good, what is beautiful. Plato describes metaxu, the condition of “being ‘in-between’ our earth, our (so we suppose) comprehensible, concrete, material surroundings, and transcendence, mystery.” This in-betweenness’ “defines the situation of the human, a being who is incurably ‘en route.'” Incurably: in this life “we’ll never manage to settle permanently in transcendence once and for all.” We won’t “even fully learn its meaning,” here. We “always return to the quotidian: after experiencing an epiphany, writing a poem, we’ll go to the kitchen and decide what to have for dinner.” “And this is as it should be, since otherwise lunacy lies in wait above and boredom down below.” Because we live in-between, and must live in-between, “we must keep close guard on our own selves,” avoid the temptation to live as if permanently transported to some higher realm. That is, the opposite of inveterate irony is unthinking ardor. Still, “the real danger of our historical moment” is excess of irony, not excess of ardor. Properly exercised, irony fine tunes ardor. It should not corrode it, becoming itself “a rather perverse form of certainty.”

And it need not. “Uncertainty doesn’t contradict ardor,” as zetetic Socrates showed by his way of life. Nor does ardor preclude a sense of humor, as indeed Socrates again showed. Not only philosophy but poetry too can respond to ardor, “the earth’s fervent song,” with “our own, imperfect song.” The Polish essayist and poet, Czeslaw Milosz, himself an exile from the Communist regime, has lived in “a ceaseless wandering” between the goodness of moderation and moments of transcendence, “transform[ing] the condition of metaxu into an ongoing, vivifying pilgrimage, an occupation for the long-distance artist.” “True ardor” links earth and sky; it may yet “return to our bookstores, our intellects.” 

But is poetry not vulnerable to the Socratic critique—too lacking in reason, too arbitrary? Poet Zagajewski resists the claim. “Poetry, after all, involves precision and correctness,” not “through empirical, quantifiable observations” but “through existential preparedness, through experience, through our own lives, through reflection and moments of illumination. But they are verified.” In the time of Socrates and Diotima, and very often for centuries since then, poets put precision and correctness (and not only of language) at the service of the religious beliefs they often shared with their political communities. Just as often, philosophers questioned those claims. Zagajewski rejects the aestheticist defense of poetry (“the ceaseless chatter of self-satisfied craftsmen”) as “a sort of fainthearted appeasement, a policy of evasions and concessions as concerns the literary vocation” that has resulted “in the decline of high style and the overwhelming predominance of a low style, tepid, ironic, conversational.” Poets began to take the brutal realities of the First World War as a refutation of that style because those realities belied the elevated thoughts and sentiments that young soldiers took into battle, where artillery shells ground them up in the trenches. That is, in reaction to the war they took brutal realities as reality, simply; like soldiers in the trenches, they began to keep their heads low. But this isn’t the only response to brutality. “Neither Milosz, who survived the Nazi terror, nor [Osip] Mandelstam, who didn’t survive the Stalinist nightmare, ever fell prey to the lure of a false simplicity.” Longinus understood poetry in terms of the sublime; Edmund Burke, writing on poetics and politics, understood the sublime and the beautiful—which he distinguished, as between ‘Jerusalem’ and ‘Athens,’ while firmly acknowledging prudence as the virtue of politics. “Surely we don’t go to poetry for sarcasm or irony, for critical distance, learned dialectics or clever jokes”; “from poetry we expect poetry,” that is, “the vision, the fire, the flame, that accompanies spiritual revelation.” (We might even go to it for prudence, as Shakespeare proves.)

But does that vision, that fire, that flame of spiritual revelation reveal truth—that is, truth beyond the honest expression of the sentiments of the poet? Does the spiritual revelation poets bring to their readers have a genuinely noetic character? “The sublime must be understood differently these days,” “stripped of its neoclassical pomp, its alpine stage set, its theatrical overkill” to reveal not dogmatic certitudes but “the world’s mystery.” That is, poetry must become zetetic, like Socrates. And for its part, philosophy must not preen itself as the authoritative expression of the ‘spirit of the times.’ Zagajewski quotes the German poet and philosopher Rudolf Pannwitz: “Philosophy is the epoch’s judge, but things go ill when it becomes the epoch’s mouthpiece,” even as politics goes wrong when it attempts to bring the sublime directly into practice. (Pannwitz, an admirer of Nietzsche, might have reflected on that. And not only Pannwitz, Zagajewski suggests, but Jünger, Drieu La Rochelle, Malraux, Hemingway, Benn, Mayakovsky, Montherlant, Brecht, Yeats, Eliot—critics not of (or, in Hemingway’s case, not only of) the brutality of modern war but of the banality of modern peace.)

Poetry has its own form of dialectics. “The high style grows from a ceaseless dialogue between two spheres, the spiritual realm whose guardians and creators are the dead (like Virgil in the Divine Comedy) and the domain of eternal praesens, our single, precious moment, the pocket of time in which we’ve chanced to live.” What, then, can mediate between the high and the down-to-earth, whether the down-to-earth is brutal or ‘bourgeois’? “A certain metaphysical modesty,” not lacking in humor, “learning to open up” to the sublime and the beautiful in a way precluded in minds overwhelmed by the brutality of war and the banality of peace. “Modernity can’t be fought (you won’t win), even if it needs chiding upon occasion”; it “must be improved, expanded, enhanced, enriched; we must speak to it” because it “resides within us; it’s too late to attack it from the sidelines.” At the same time, “while high style need no longer stem from a dislike of modernity,” the “low style—ironic, colloquial, flat, small, minimal—may arise precisely from ressentiment—from a rejection of our silver-tongued forebears.” 

Nietzsche, the poetic philosopher who inspired those forebears, “was a mysterious figure to me and my contemporaries back in the seventies” in Poland. The Communist regime dismissed him as a lunatic, attempting to steer impressionable youths away, with the predictable opposite effect, giving him “the glory of the poète maudit.” In reading him, young Poles in Krakow experienced “the same shiver of emotion that his first readers must have felt.” Nietzsche’s derision of the pure scholars, “who seem to know everything” by means of analysis, recognizes that such men “study the fire but can describe only its ashes.” “Nietzsche gleefully calls this principle that the scholars overlook none other than life itself.” Nor did Nietzsche neglect to scorn the political dimension of modern rationalism, the state, “Bismarck’s Reich.” This braced the young Zagajewski, “living as I did under the rule of the totalitarian, Khruschevian-Brezhnevian-Gomulkovian system and half consciously seeking allies in the challenging acrobatics act of liberating oneself from the ideological and administrative constraints of Marxism.” “Here was someone who came right out and proclaimed his intellectual independence,” who “spoke from within his own spirit,” with “such buoyancy and brilliance” in resistance to “the automatism of a specific historical reality.” Such “spiritual resources” have “no need for bureaucrats and political structures.”

At the same time, “I was put off by his jabs at Socrates. I liked and admired Socrates; I had a hard time believing that the decline of Greek and European culture began with him.” But as a young poet, Zagajewski read Nietzsche not for his (mis)judgments of Socrates and of Christianity but for the “charge of pure energy” Nietzsche puts into his writing, brings to his readers. As he read on, and as his own life went forward, he came to Nietzsche’s later works, “the bombastic Zarathustra, the insufferable, unpardonably narcissistic Ecce Homo, the grim, posthumously published Will to Power.” The older Nietzsche struck the older Zagajewski as taking “the tone of a cult’s founder, of a perverse moralist obsessed with settling scores with Christianity, socialism, morality.” The older Nietzsche “did not escape the dangers of solitude that he had pointed out in his youthful essay on ‘Schopenhauer as educator’—a certain embitterment, a callousness.” Nietzsche’s retinue of followers, including but not limited to the luminaries Zagajewski has already listed, animated a century of politics they lacked the spiritual resources adequately to resist; they resisted the banality but not so much the brutality. “Certain extravagances of modern French thought,” for example, “might never have seen the light of day,” had Nietzsche not ginned up the thinkers. Was not even the Marxist V. I. Lenin, not the author of his own “manifesto of the will to power,” What Is to Be Done?” written in 1902, “when Nietzsche mania had seized all of Europe”? “I’m not sure…that I wouldn’t prefer” a “hypothetical century without Nietzsche.” “Would it have been such a disaster if Nietzsche’s famous skepticism toward the notion of truth hadn’t given birth to so many eager imitators, even in the last few decades?” In Nietzsche, and in his followers, “irrationality finally wins the day” in “this unsuccessful, betrayed mediation” between the high and the low. [1]

As a result, today “we have a vast, positivist, scientific culture that has almost entirely been purged of curiosity about the dark and irrational, while on the other hand there is the New Age with its superstitious take on the cosmos, alongside mass culture, which either favors sentimentalism or else openly admits its fascination with force, blood, and the devil.” Nonetheless, it remains true that “Nietzsche can neither be acquitted nor convicted in the political courtroom to which he is dragged time after time by both his admirers and his enemies.” Better for poets to seek “suggestions, allusions, a net full of metaphors,” amidst the “energizing uncertainty” of being, rather than “a single, central metaphor” that attempts to find and enunciate a comprehensive systematic of being. “God may have died” in the minds of moderns; this means that Dante’s poetic universe will not be reimagined any time soon. But Nietzsche was right to see that the world the moderns have made for themselves “doesn’t cherish life,” lacking “generosity, spontaneity, nobility, and poetry.” 

For one who cherished life with the strengths of character a life lived humanly requires, Zagajewski turns to the example of Józef Czapski, whom he met while both men lived in Paris, both in exile from Communist Poland. Soldier, painter, poet, essayist, Czapski had survived his internment at Katyn after Soviet forces attacked Nazi Germany. He as transferred to another prison camp before some 22,000 Polish military officers, police officers, and intelligentsia were murdered by the Soviets in several of the NKVD prisons, then buried in mass graves in and around Katyn. At the Vologda camp, he delivered lectures on Proust to his fellow prisoners. His books were banned by the Polish Communist regime, complicit in the Soviet cover-up of its war crimes.

He descended from an aristocratic family, taking from the aristocracy “only his graciousness, his breeding.” A Catholic, “he was so profoundly antidogmatic that he didn’t even trust himself,” suspecting “that faith was taking the easy way” but knowing “that disbelief could be easy too.” He resembled Socrates in that “his ‘I don’t know’ was passionate, incandescent,” ardent. “This wasn’t an ‘I don’t know’ arising from amnesia, laziness, depression, negativity, agnosticism. This ‘I don’t know’ was positive, inspired, intelligent,” “the soul of his spiritual life, his long pilgrimage.” It was “accompanied by an equally decisive ethical ‘I do know,” whereby he did not hesitate “when it came to helping the suffering, bearing witness to historical truth” (he had investigated Soviet Russian atrocities during the Polish-Soviet War that followed the Great War and those committed during the second Great War), “opposing Stalinism or Nazism.” For his trouble, the “fanatical Parisian communists” of the late 1940s “murmured that he must be one of Goebbels’s agents.” He was “the master of my not-knowing. And what is not-knowing but thought?” What the ardent Socrates knew.

“He was curiosity personified, the perfect embodiment of curiosity.” In this, “he had an extraordinary gift for empathy,” listening intently to his visitors but resisting any final judgment on what he heard from them, always ready to renew the conversation. His “theodicy was meant to remain incomplete,” as “he was constantly testing to see if his experiences were real, if those great moments of illumination weren’t simply a diversionary ploy undertaken by his glands and hormones.” As an artist, he distrusted the iconoclastic mysticism of Simone Weil and as for the regnant historicisms of his time, he exclaimed, “What’s all this about the Zeitgeist, what counts is staying true to your own vision, end discussion!” [2] And if Nietzsche, with all his thunderous judgments, finally fell short of self-knowledge, “this judge, who was also a painter, above all a painter, judged and observed himself as well, unlike those other judges who judge others exclusively and lose sight of themselves as soon as they don the wigs that transform them into wax figures, bodiless and passionless so that they can’t see themselves.” [3] In Czapski, the investigator of Soviet massacres and poet, inner freedom and civil liberty achieved “something like harmony.” To Stalin’s police, who “knew perfectly well what had happened to the Polish officers” at Katyn, an atrocity he investigated after the war, he “personified an enemy class…doomed to extinction.” And it is true that Polish aristocrats are in short supply, these days, but the Soviet Union isn’t around anymore, either. 

In Milosz, “a poet of great intelligence and great ecstasy,” he finds an equally anti-historicist tenor. “Milosz courageously takes the field to test himself against his foes, as if he’d told himself, I’ll survive this age only by absorbing it.” His poems exude “the scent not of roses but of reason,” but not the reason of modern rationalists. He understands reason in the older sense, “a way that precedes the great schism which placed the intellect of the rationalists on one side of the divide, while the other was occupied by the imagination and intelligence of the arts, who not infrequently take refuge in irrationality.” Poetry has nothing necessarily to fear from that reason, as both poetry and classical reason can “raise us above the petty network of empirical circumstances that make up our everyday lot and confinement,” “so that we can scrutinize the world attentively and ardently.” Zagajewski finds poetry’s limit in its incapacity to scrutinize modern tyranny, in “a certain variety of evil…that is simultaneously both psychological and theological,” the evil of Hitler and Stalin. For understanding that, “reach rather for historians and philosophers” or for Dostoevsky’s novels. (But perhaps also for some epic poetry, Milton, Satan’s “Evil, be thou my good”? In saying “poetry,” Zagajewski seems to be thinking mostly of lyric poetry, however.) Poetry is better at the gentler but indispensable task of “defending the spiritual life, the inner voice that speaks to us, or perhaps only whispers…as the mainstay and foundation of our freedom,” guarding “the indispensable territory of reflection and independence” against “the mighty blows and temptations of modern life.” Lyric poetry lives between reasoning inquiry and the certitudes of revelation, “between Athens and Jerusalem,” the “rift” described by Lev Shestov and Leo Strauss. “I’m angered only by small poetry, mean-spirited, unintelligent, a lackey poetry, slavishly intent on the promptings of the spirit of the age, that lazy bureaucrat flitting just above the earth in a dirty cloud of illusion”—a cheap certitude that requires none of the demands of revelation. Given the temptation to write this way, “poetry needs doubt far more than doubt needs poetry,” a doubt that purges poetry of “rhetorical insincerity, senseless chatter, falsehood, youthful loquacity, empty (inauthentic) euphoria.” At the same time, poetry opposes the excess of doubt, the resigned giving up of the search for insight, the urge to drop off Diotima’s ladder.

But how can one live a life that inquires in the poetic manner? In his final chapters, Zagajewski considers the poet’s regime—not in the sense of the rulers and ruling institutions above him, but a right way of life for him. First, leisure—as the classics would agree. From the “Puritan workaholism” of the United States to the “almost Stakhanovite work ethic” that once animated Germany, to the really Stakhanovite work ethic propounded by the Soviets, and even to the frenzied pseudo-leisure of ‘travel’ (“which tears us from our favorite books”), the contemporary world is hard on leisure. Still, one having arrived at a trip’s destination, there is refreshment in getting away from books for a while and taking a look the outside world. Zagajewski even recommends a destination: Punto Bianca, Sicily, where the remains of Hitler’s bunkers dot a spectacular beach and nature preserve. And he recounts visits to his native Lvov (“a beautiful city, bright gold in the sharp sunlight”), Krakow, the place of his intellectual awakening, and Paris in “November’s sweet warmth,” no longer Europe’s intellectual capital (is there one?). 

Second, reading. “Young poets, please read everything.” Read for memory, be “curious about what our many precursors produced before our own minds were opened.” And “read for ecstasy,” for wisdom and information but also for “a kind of energy that comes close to dance and shamanistic drunkenness.” “Memory and ecstasy need each other desperately,” memory for sober grounding, ecstasy as one reward for ardor. 

Never forget your country—Poland for Zagajewski, with its “long, theatrical existence” of military defeat, partition, tyranny with occasional glimpses of freedom. “The present young generation, well versed in postmodern theory and the pitfalls of the text, has already forgotten [the] horror” of the Communist regime, but they might make the effort to read the books that can teach them. “Polish poets never accepted modernism’s ascetic dictates; they refused to retreat to a sanctuary of hermetic metaphors”; their increasingly unwitting successors would do well to refuse retreat into a sanctuary of hermetic ‘deconstruction.’ And given that, as La Rochefoucauld observed, “sun and death” are the “two forces we can’t look in the face,” they might consider “the now unfashionable (and essential) question of religion.” Plato’s eros is one form of ardor, Biblical agape another.

 

Note

1. It is fair to say that Zagajewski follows Nietzsche, the ‘young Nietzsche,’ as it were, in his protest against the positivist rationalism of German (and Euro-American) scholarship of the late nineteenth century. But he prefers Socrates, whose only professed knowledge is of eros (a not-inconsiderable knowledge, inasmuch as he presents it as the animating reality of all nature), to the Nietzsche who replaces Socratic eros with the will to power. For a sympathetic treatment of Nietzsche’s ‘turn,’ see Laurence Lampert: Strauss, Plato, Nietzsche (Philadelphia: Paul Dry Books, 2024).
2. Of another poet he admires, Zbigniew Herbert, Zagajewski remarks, “Poetry by its nature is not an entirely faithful daughter of its age; unfaithful, since she commands a secret hideout known only to herself in which she can always take refuge.” 
3. Did Nietzsche really lack self-knowledge? The eminent Nietzsche scholar Laurence Lampert thinks not: see Lampert, op. cit.

Adam Zagajewski: Two Cities: On Exile, History, and the Imagination. Lillian Vallee translation.  Athens: The University of Georgia Press, 2002. Originally published in Polish in 1991.

 

“Two cities” evokes Dickens’s modern city, sundered between ‘haves’ and ‘have-nots,’ revolutionaries and the old regime; it evokes Augustine’s City of God and City of Man, also Plato’s city in speech, in the light of nature and his cave-city, dark, where subjects are ruled by manipulators of shadows on the wall. For the Polish poet and essayist Adam Zagajewski, writing in the aftermath of the liberation of the Central European countries from the Soviet empire, “two cities” means all of these things and more, beginning with the two cities known to his parents, one of them he could only imagine.

He titles the first of his book’s three sections “Two Cities,” meaning Lvov, “the extraordinarily beautiful city” his family was forced to leave in a population transfer after World War II, and the “ugly industrial city,” Gliwice, where they lived shortly before he was born. According to the terms of the Yalta settlement, Poland “had simply shifted to the west,” with Lvov assigned to Soviet Ukraine, Gliwice taken from the Germans, who had ruled it since the mid-eighteenth century, first under Prussia, then under the Austrian Empire. (The Lvov exiles “walked the streets, looking with amazement at the Prussian bricks of the tenements.”) In his parents’ telling, in the telling of all the exiles, Lvov was “their lost city,” its surrounding hills heavy with raspberry bushes. “My parents’ life was cut in two: before they left and after they left.” A condition both unique to themselves and the other uprooted Polish Ukrainians but universal, as “no matter where one cuts and divides life, one cuts and divides it into two halves,” two cities of the soul; for Zagajewski, life divides between Communist-ruled Gliwice and Poland’s liberation in the wake of Soviet withdrawal.

He had glimpses of liberation before the liberation, initially in the form of music. At the age of 16 he obtained some classical music records, lifted by a classmate from the student music club, after a fire. “There weren’t many classical records in the stores. It seems that Wladyslaw Gomulka, the man running Poland at the time, placed no great value on music (which took its toll—his governing was highly unmusical).” Music did for the future poet what reasoning does for Socrates’ future philosophers: it elevated him beyond the existing city, whose laws he and his classmate scarcely respected, to a better one. “Music was created for the homeless because, of all the arts, it is least connected with place,” unlike painting, “the art of a settled people who enjoy contemplating their native haunts.” Distinct from both, poetry befits not the homeless or the settled but emigrants, “those unlucky ones who stand over an abyss—between generations, between continents [“the new inhabitants of Gliwice reminded one of Europeans only superficially”]—with their miserable belongings.” While music saved Zagajewski from the worst effects of the Communist regime in Poland, poetry better fit his, and his family’s, status within that regime. Their ancestors in Lvov—members of “that chimerical social stratum called the intelligentsia” and consisting of “notaries, schoolteachers, doctors, defunct gentry, most often leading an uncertain existence, eating someone else’s bread”—lived in one place, but it was a place in a partitioned country, a place ruled by the Austrian emperor, Franz Josef, “who lived so long he almost became a freak of nature, like an ancient linden tree.” In dislocation, the soul comes to depend even more than usual on family. “Families, bastions of fraternity and self-help, were the real frames of reference” for all social classes, and families were ruled by women. “My uncles didn’t usually live as long; they vanished into banks or schools, silent, absorbed in reading newspapers or books, while my aunts ruled their families, long before the triumphs of feminism, as Queen Victoria had ruled the United Kingdom, except perhaps a bit more ruthlessly.” In Gliwice, all of them were “living shadows, emigrants in their own country”—doubles. “They carried their past around like mothballs,” dying “distrustfully because they did not know this place, this air, this land very well.” As they aged, they lost their memories of the recent past, “return[ing] to old memories, which nothing is capable of eradicating.” “They returned to Lvov.” 

Parodying Marxist analysis, Zagajewski classifies their property into three categories: aristocratic, bourgeois, socialist. “The aristocratic came from Lvov” because they could take only what was most valuable from there, during deportation. He calls these objects aristocratic because “generally speaking they served no purpose and had a sentimental rather than a market value.” “In everyday speech we called them ‘prewar.'” The “post-German” or bourgeois objects consisted of things the Germans had left behind after being kicked out. They too had taken their aristocratic property with them, leaving “many utilitarian things—Singer sewing machines, Erika and Continental typewriters, tools, bicycles, cheap silverware.” “I am sure that no one will believe me, but the things brought from Lvov really did smell different from the local post-German things.” As for the socialist objects, those of the third category, they were badly made.

So was the socialist regime. “One recognized the new system by the following symptoms: fear, blood draining out of the face, trembling hands, talking in whispers, silence, apathy, sealing windows shut, suspicion of one’s neighbors, signing up for the hated party membership.” “In the city of my childhood Plato’s two great beasts came together. One was, naturally, organic to a considerable degree, practically covered with real animal fur and, actually, if left alone, if not irritated by the Jews or the Ukrainians, was good-natured and languid. The other had artificial but sharp teeth, fake skin, red banners, and loudspeakers instead of a larynx. One came from Lvov, the other from Moscow. Two conformities. One molded by centuries, formed by man generations of gentry and pharmacists, shoemakers and doctors; the other constructed in a hurry by Lenin and his guillotined friends.” The Leninist regime of Poland “was a conformity without conformists, as it was actually rather difficult to come across zealous proponents of the new system.” It brought forth exiles from itself, exiles imprisoned in place, whether the place was original or new to them. The grand Marxist synthesis the regime essayed was too ‘synthetic’ to overcome the sense that one always lives in two cities. The dialectic never really abated, endemic as it is to being human. The socialists “wanted to change human nature,” to reduce the many ‘types’ that nature spawns (“Cheater, Globetrotter, Gadfly, Drunkard, Proprietor, Tenant, Seducer, Seduced, Pawnbroker, Priest, Artist”) to only three: “Functionary, Worker, Policeman.” “All this took pace in my city, in my school, on my street, in my life, although for a long time I did not realize the seriousness of the situation.”

Zagajewski was an exile living within that regime, taking refuge first in the city of music, but then in a deserted park, a place within the larger place. “In the eyes of the oldest people, and especially of the oldest, I became practically a traitor,” having found something beautiful in despised Gliwice, but he could not be an exile in the same way as they were. He was looking at leaves he saw with his eyes, they at the leaves of Lvov, remembered leaves, “eternal, eternally green and eternally alive, indestructible and perfect.” It was Kant who argued that existing things are in a sense no different from imagined things of the same kind. The Polish elders unwittingly pointed to a philosophic truth. 

Still another regime, another city, beckoned: the Roman Catholic Church. “In the battle of the two beasts,” Lvov and Moscow, “the church played an exceptionally important role,” as the Lvov beast “lived in the churches, took refuge in them, revitalized its forces there, nourished itself in them, rested and regenerated itself.” As an altar boy, however, Zagajewsi joined a band of “nihilists, not at all interests in faith or metaphysics, Christ or Judas,” “interested only in the efficient use of the censer and an assortment of bells, an impeccable choreography and in the ability to assume the look of serious concentration the moment the retinue left the joyful sacristy,” where pranks and jokes were the way of life, opposed both to clerical and socialist regimes. He was ill-fitted to both, and soon entered still another regime, the regime of the Boy Scouts, a regime of “new freedoms” that permitted him to “prowl the streets, with a map, compass, and Finnish scout knife.”. “I had no idea then how different the two vocations were”—altar boys serving as intermediaries, if not between God and man, then between the priest and the parishioners—while the scout learns to be either a soldier or an adventurer, neither vocation needing “the ingratiating affability typical of intermediaries.” (One might think that Zagajewski took something from both regimes, since a writer is a solitary adventurer who nonetheless serves as an intermediary.) 

Another motif of Platonic political philosophy, sort of, could be seen in the academy, which in Communist Poland was not to be confused with the Academy of Athens. “The majority of my teachers were liars—not bald-faced, arrogant deceivers but, rather, hesitant people who let us know they had to lie and thus warned their pupils not to take them seriously. The same thing was to happen at the university, almost the same kind of apologetic lie.” The apologetic lie, as distinguished from the noble lie of Socrates’ City in Speech, served not a just regime but accommodated an unjust and, at the time, immovable one; it had a certain educative value, inasmuch as its transparency taught due caution to young and therefore inexperienced Poles, who might well have been treated unjustly, had they spoken too loudly and too soon. “Uneasy, full of longing,” school friends hung out on the streets after school, reluctant to go home. “I had experienced something new: one could be with others, in a group, in a small group, and remain oneself.” He understood “that these kinds of moments of friendly intimacy could not happen too often, that one could not will them.” Two kinds of intimacy, then: the frank, rare intimacy among friends; routine, pedagogic winks and nods. It wasn’t until the late 1970s that “this changed and there appeared a greater and greater respect for the efficacy of action.”

And then there was poetry. Zbigniew Herbert “was the first real poet I had listened to,” when he came to talk at Zagajewski’s school. It was in hearing a poem about a teacher that “I understood…or at least I felt vaguely, that social issues could be tied to nonsocial ones, that one could speak about something that belongs to the community in a way that goes beyond the limits of this category.” His eroticism, the eroticism Plato and Plato’s Socrates know, “a desire born of love and sex, philosophy and poetry, politics and metaphysics,” an insatiable, “gargantuan” desire, took hold of him. “It seemed to me that what was real must be the opposite of convention and schema, it must be fresh as early morning and as dense as ash leaves.” To seek beyond convention and schema is to leave oneself vulnerable to error. “I will always be ready to commit a new error, and then I will try to understand it and correct it.” At the same time, confession is “a highly risky literary venture, because we begin to try to exploit it for ourselves and brag about this or that weakness” with the vanity Pascal warned against. Erotic rebelliousness needs a certain moderation, and if this is a bit too much to ask of an ardent young man, let him listen to music, which harmonizes the soul even as it liberates it. “I was attracted by the principle of improvisation at the basis of jazz,” the “lyrical exaltation” that “swept away, or so I thought, so I felt, the entire soullessness and pettiness of a conventional reality.” “To me jazz was a paean to spontaneity, even to freedom” within drab, dirty Gliwice, a city “full of conventions,” a city that “endured by dint of convention.” And then there was reading, opening “a spiritual world described by great writers,” a “domain of the imagination, which is basically the same palpable, visible, and fragrant world except that it is enriched by countless legions of spirits and shadows,” with “a meaning, hidden from day to day but accessible in moments of greatest attentiveness, in those moments when consciousness loves the world.”

He had not yet seen that most people don’t find the meaning of their lives through knowledge but through living itself, “through their radiant living substance”; “that is why it is stupid and absurd to accuse them of ignorance,” and that to do so is “unpleasant and conceited.” “Perhaps they did not know the answers to my questions”—he had the habit of ‘testing’ people he met on their literary knowledge—but “they did see something of which I had no inkling: that I was ridiculous.” Gradually, however, he came to see the city “in a new perspective,” noticing the duality of the lives of unthoughtful people, who also lived in two different cities, “in two different ways”—the first, the “most real and passionate way,” in their struggles for “their survival and also the quality, the dignity of that survival,” against a regime intent on controlling the terms and conditions of both, the second in their attempts “to appear, to shine, and show off their advantages,” nourishing their vanity. “Now even I began to walk two cities, just like my grandfather’s generation, for who, each corner could conceal the holy walls of Lvov.” True, “there was always too little knowledge, too little brilliant revelation,” but “doubts, those sparrows of the intelligence, were never lacking.” He began to know that he did not know. “Who would not want to know the pleasure of understanding?”—Aristotle’s point about all human beings, not only philosophers. He discovered humanness in himself, in others.

Zagajewski follows this unified, autobiographical section with “Open Archives,” a five-chapter section, each a short story. The stories speak in the voices of five types of persons who embody the Polish Communist regime or have been imprisoned in it—a postwar bureaucrat delivering instructions for the secret police; a Party-approved writer being interviewed and held to account by a journalist after the regime’s fall; the Polish nation itself, writing to God; a writer who survived the regime and now lives in the West; and the Chairman of the Polish Communist Party, defending Communist rule over the Polish.

The bureaucrat begins by telling the police officers “what reality is.” Its essence is force; the characteristic “delusion” of its inhabitants is that “the world is steered and governed by so-called values, that is weakness”; he doesn’t know why these things are so, only that they are. That is, the Communist is more a demi-Nietzschean as a Marxist, there being no mention of dialectics, the triumphant victory of the vanguard of the proletariat, or some future communalism. He, too, knows that he does not know the answer to the ‘ontological’ question, although he is quite sure he knows what physics is. Reality, called ‘evil,’ undergirds good, which “inhabits rhetoric.” Even generals “do not have the habit of shouting ‘Kill!’; instead they declaim stanzas about honor.” Even “a penetrating philosopher like Schopenhauer,” who “examined and described the cunning of force,” praised “music, poetry, art in general, that is, rhetoric.” He “got cold feet”; he censored himself. After reading his chapters on the world as will the bureaucrat felt the chapters on the world as imagination “as if my closest friend had stuck a knife in my back.” “Machiavelli tried once” to publicize reality, but “to this day the stomachs of universities have not digested him.” Do not let the weaklings “enchant you with the siren voice of beauty,” he tells the police officers. “Be cynical. Only in this way can we—and only we—rescue the world from the next cataclysm” cooked up by the deluded paradise-mongers. That is, the self-described teacher of realism at bottom lives on the illusion of the Party as world savior.

The interviewer in the second story, “Betrayal,” has asked the writer why he did what he did under the Communist regime. Who was he? He begins with his first “knowledge of Communism,” first at home, from family and school friends, who saw only brute, isolated facts—beatings, killings, seizure of property, suicides—but “were unable to join [these facts] into a system,” into the “modern Thomism” of Marxism, “with its ambition of encompassing all being.” What the interviewer must understand, the writer explains, is how “the world of that epoch of saturated with energy,” with “the thrill of fear, hatred, but also of ambition, envy, hope for a career,” all seeming likely to last a very long time, even forever—the Marxist, atheist, equivalent of Thomas’s Christian eternity. As always, under every regime, “young, ambitious people appeared in the capital and intended to make the best use of their talents,” even if, under this regime, that meant their talents were employed in writing paeans to Stalin. “Coercion entered the chemical reaction along with completely spontaneous ambition.” 

As for the unjustified imprisonments and torture sessions, “I knew and didn’t know at the same time.” There were the rumors, but “those were only whispers and not knowledge”; meanwhile, the “vital world” of ambition moved along. The principle of the thing. “Only in youth does one treat philosophy more seriously; only then does one search for an ultimate solution, a clear answer,” and that is precisely why the Communists’ philosophy “was created almost especially for young people—young, striving people who saw in Marxism not a threat but an opportunity for advancing in life.” Yes, Mr. Interviewer, I did indeed betray not only “my nation, my family and myself but also of the nature of this work,” my vocation as a poet, “reject[ing] the quiet, fundamental change whose meaning I recognized during my long walks on the outskirts of the city.” I am a “broken man,” one who has “never been able to write anything on the scale of that vocation.” Do not tell me “that I have rehabilitated myself through my later actions,” that I now “deserve Christian forgiveness.” “You want to take away even my betrayal,” “take away my defeat, take it from me and put it in your museum of civic virtues.” “Do you know what I could have done, do you have any idea about the taste of works I did not write?” “I could have been a Petrarch. I saw the fire.” I could have written according to the vision afforded me by my inner Lvov.

How, then, did he live this life, under the Communist regime? His editor told him to write an attack on an elderly poet, who might have suffered, even died, had he read it, but he persuaded the editor to accept an attack on T. S. Eliot, who of course never saw it. Yes, my article was a vile assault on “the ideals of Western culture,” “yet it conceals one of the most heroic acts of my life (which doesn’t mean much).” “You,” my interviewer, “reason in absolute categories. But at that time people lived differently: making constant choices, in relations, in comparisons. One lived between possibilities…. As you see, I could choose between murder and baseness.” I chose baseness. Can you honestly blame me? My only real power was to betray myself, which I eventually did by laughing out loud at a solemn party conference, thereby losing “one set of friends” without gaining any other. Life itself is betrayal because “there is no form of life which could satisfy the postulates of immortality.” “To live is to betray, to be below value, below expectations” in a dual, torn world, vile, “even in the most peaceful countries.” No political regime will “save your soul”; if you believe one will, “you are repeating my mistake from bygone days, except that now it has a different costume; you believe too much in systems.” 

The interviewer doesn’t argue the point. He instead produces another ‘attack’ piece the writer did, which, along with others written by other writers at the command of the Party caused the victim to commit suicide. The suicide was the interviewer’s father. To which the writer can only stammer, “Those were difficult times.” One should not believe too much in systems, but neither should believe too little in them.

What if you see that a life of prudent compromise will not do? If “a small nation,” like Poland, “writes a letter to God,” if an earthly city appeals for justice to the heavenly city, what then? The nation cannot write to God with eloquence, beautifully, because the writers who could have done so “are no longer alive,” or they live in exile, “even though You had created them to speak.” Whole nations now can be thrown into exile, now that trains have been invented, albeit for quite other purposes. “The people were jammed in. Crushed. Bone on bone, shoulder to shoulder, in an unwanted embrace,” the unintended embodiment of the dreams of nationalists: “the nation in a concentrated form, dense, endowed with one will, body on body, skull to skull, the end of capricious individualism.” Even a philosopher could not “remain a philosopher in a freight car”—a philosopher, like Socrates, who dared to oppose his thoughts to the opinions of the city. Survivors of mass deportation come back but “they are not alive.”

What do we want from God, then? To “allow us to endure,” to “keep our language and our songs,” to “listen to whispering grasses and leaves in the evening.” “O Great Ironist, You, who next to majestic eagles created cheery and good-natured sparrows as well, allow us to laugh at ourselves; do not take away our sober gaze, our realistic judgment.” Allow us “to die in our own beds, in our childhood homes.” I admit that I am not really a nation, writing, only “a solitary, mortal scribe who is bent over on an old church pew left by someone in the woodshed,” perhaps from a church officially ‘decommissioned’ by the Communists. How could a nation write? Hence the falsehood of collectivism, whether ‘nationalist,’ ‘internationalist,’ or, as with yesterday’s Stalin or today’s China, some combination of both.

The voice who speaks to readers in the fourth story tells them, “I have been living in the West for a few years now,” an exile, flying to conferences and lectures, watching the surface of the earth from the vantage point next to an airplane window. The earth’s surface is complex, with its “forests like green lace, cities like beads, the pastel colors of spring fields.” In Poland, “everything was clear-cut”—hunters and hunted, persecutors and persecuted. Here, not so simple. There are “too many friendships, too much good will,” and for him, a prominent writer, “too much celebrity.” “I do not know what reality is.” I thought I did. I no longer know who I am, here. “I looked around: no one walked behind me,” and “I laughed,” since such a city “can’t be serious.” Surrounded by such “an abundance of things” in the affluent West, “a piece of my ‘I’ becomes harsh, sticky small, tall, nasal, time, nocturnal,” deprived of “my unwavering certainty, my steadfast faith, my inconsolable despair.” Alone, “completely free,” I find myself “in the city of my dreams,” in my spiritual Lvov. But what now? I still cannot achieve perfection. It is one thing to live among “cheaters” and “decent people with their weaknesses,” another to experience “the strange and sneaky erosion of faith” that proceeds “so slowly, but steadily every month.” Beauty is now common, “accessible.” No more worries about paying dearly for a record of a Mozart quintet. Because “everything is everywhere,” if in different proportions everywhere, “Where is God—in suffering or in joy, in a beam of light or in terror, in a rich, free city or in a concentration camp?” Under Communism, I could always say ‘no,’ at least in my poetry. The ‘no’ concealed a hidden ‘yes,’ but the cohabitation of ‘no’ and ‘yes’ in the same soul “is incredibly difficult, almost impossible, destined for failure.” “I desired simplicity and uniformity, when the desire itself was deceptive and testified to the progress of the inevitable process of differentiation.” That desire is the desire of Communism’s terribles simplificateurs, is it not? He has found their impulse in himself. As he walks the streets of Paris, he gets lost, eventually finding his hotel. The clerk tells him that this happened because Paris is a city of acute angles, not right angles. The free city is in its own way at least as instructive as the tyrannized city. But it is harder to learn what it teaches.

“The Chairman’s Secret Speech” is spoken in the voice of the ruler of the Communist regime, a man deposed along with it. He is unrepentant. Admittedly, he expects to die soon: “We have learned a lot since Aleksey Tolstoy said death was a bourgeois superstition.” Yes, we killed, but after all, “what exactly were we depriving our victims, our opponents of, what sort of life. A lazy, sedentary, vegetative one.”  We were the ones who were truly alive, “we are movement,” and those who did not “grow into one with us” weren’t really alive to begin with. Dicken’s novels, his tale of two cities, the ruling city, the capitalist city, so full of evil, baseness parading as dignity “in the bourgeois praise of virtue.” We, however, “wanted a better life, a different humanity—nobler, purer.” To get it, we destroyed a world “full of suffering, pain, anger, and boredom.” As for God, “Do you regret a God no one has seen?”

“We had to simplify many complicated processes,” punishing the children along with their parents. “Great changes cannot satisfy everyone; that is not why they are brought about.” Since we left power, Europe has rotted into sybaratism, and “stupid, dark humanity, a zoo, a flurry of idiots seeking to sate themselves,” some even “returning to church to once again kiss the soft palms of vicars, cannot yet “understand what it has lost,” the “opportunity it has squandered.” “What do you regret? Childhood? Clouds which seemed larger than the royal palace? Sparrows dancing on asphalt? Carnivals? Butchers in spattered aprons? Horses losing their footing on the frozen road? Life?”

Nietzsche, the philosopher of life-force is the topic of the first of thirty-three pieces in the book’s third section, which consists of essays, aphorisms, and some more short stories—as variegated as life. Zagajewski’s Nietzsche is dual, rather like the ‘young Marx’ and the ‘old Marx’ imagined by those who would redeem Marxism. The young Nietzsche is indeed the celebrant of life, the mocker of scholars who know so much about the Greek heroes and the poet who celebrate them while deforming themselves, becoming hunchbacks bent over manuscripts slowly disintegrating in libraries. The young Nietzsche “feels the stunning contrast between methodical, positivistic historicism and fanciful Athens.” “Historical memory appears to him as the opposite of creativity.” Opposed to Nietzsche one reads Zbigniew Herbert’s Barbarian in the Garden, the same poet Zagajewski heard in school. “It never occurs to him to get angry at historicism.” On the contrary, “historical memory, and especially the loveliest component of it, which has been preserved in works of art, is something absolutely vivifying.” It was the Communist regime that Herbert and Zagajewski experienced in Poland which “declared war on memory,” portraying as all history prior to itself as “full of mistakes, ravings, misunderstandings, and crimes,” not in order to speak the truth but to foster “servile glorification” of itself. Herbert well knows history’s cruelty. But he “accepts history with all its duality of architecture and pain.” The creativity Nietzsche celebrates needs memory, too. “To build a bridge one must first—small detail—come upon a river.” 

The philosopher versus the poet. It is Zagajewski’s central theme in this final section. “Ideas become a prison. They assume a legal power, as binding as Lenin’s decrees.” Philosophic systematizers imprison the minds of the students he sees in the library; “the dual madness of reason” seen in Ernst Jünger’s enthusiasm for botanical and entomological classification (“to know the order of the world—and what?”) and on its other side in Jean-Paul Sartre’s “arbitrary activism”—essentialism in one, existentialism in the other, pervade the books they read. “Neither, of course, is right: neither the subjective, irresponsible Sartre, seeking only authenticity, nor the fatalistic, passive Jünger.” Neither could sustain his stance: system-intoxicated Jünger, a conservative German nationalist who rejected the political systematic of Nazism; Sartre, the existentialist who nonetheless succumbed to the political systematic of Communism. (“Marx found a way of dealing with suffering—he put it into scientific perspective. From then on, he and countless Marxists on planet Earth and in orbiting satellites could sleep soundly.”) To forget “the objective world, the search for truth,” or to become preoccupied with only the truth of the world, objective reality, forgetting one’s “own weaknesses, his own life,” misses the mystery of the world. “We do not know what poetry is. We do not know what suffering is. We do not know what death is. We do know what mystery is.” If Zagajewski were a philosopher, he would be a Socratic. As a poet, he might not be admitted to Socrates’ city in speech, but he might be admitted to his circle of companions, the real city in speech. “O indiscreet philosophers” (perhaps most especially modern philosophers?) I note now that you want to deprive me of even that which is my most private property, my secret,” naming and classifying “half situations and quarter moods.” “Write poems instead.” Because “the spiritual life does not submit to political mandates and barely tolerates ethical postulates. Thoughts are free…. The world is torn. Long live duality!” Politically, then, insofar as politics does not quash the spirit, become ‘liberal.’

In the life of the mind, prefer Bruno Schulz to most of the others. A Jew from Drohobycz, a town in the Lvov region of Zagajewski’s family, Schulz studied architecture, found work as a drawing-and-crafts teacher, then became famous, briefly, in Poland before the Second World War for his short stories. He stayed in the town where he was born, killed there by a member of the Gestapo who was feuding with another Gestapoid—in other words, killed for nothing, not even for his Jewishness, as absurd a death as any existentialist would demand. “There was only one thing he defended with great ferocity and ruthlessness: the meaning and stature of the spiritual world,” with its “struggle to maintain the tension of an inner life” in its duality, imperiled by “trivial, external circumstances and melancholy.” Although “there were many normal and ordinary things in his biography, the most extraordinary was undoubtedly his talent: his wondrous ability to transmute the commonplace into the bewitching.” In “his driving passion for ultimate answers,” his ardor, “his philosophical-poetic curiosity, we can discern Schulz’s spiritual ancestry”; he was also “inspired in part by Bergson and Nietzsche,” philosophers of the élan vitale, to whom Schulz was drawn in response “to the real, increasingly visible supremacy of the hard sciences,” the Jüngerian side of modern rationalism. The old Drohobycz has been wiped out by Nazis and Communists, and so, “only the Drohobycz created by Schulz has survived.” “For him, art was the supreme pleasure,” not as ‘aesthetics’ or l’art pour l’art but as “an act of expression, the amplification of seeing and speaking, the primary act of binding things that were once remote from one another.” If this is philosophy, it is philosophy so embedded “in the captivating sentences of his downy prose” that it can live only there, in the concrete and not in the abstract or systematic. 

The central item in this third part of Two Cities remarks a distinctive feature of the Polish language. In other languages, one says, “I was born,” deploying the passive voice, but in Polish one says, “I came into the world.” In Polish, birth is understood in the active voice, even if “quickly the passive takes over,” as in “I was transported, I was arrested, I was released.” Systematic thought, including systematic politics (the politics of “The Chairman”) can mistake life for system while rendering human beings lifeless in life or simply dead by murder. It inclines to passivity, sometimes to the extreme. Poles, at least, begin with a small linguistic advantage, one that Zagajewski would enhance by his own use of the language. “My entire education as a writer strove to free me from the caprices and grimaces of History.” He succeeded “to a certain degree,” but now that ‘History’ has changed in Poland’s favor, with the collapse of the Soviet empire, he writes with caution. “I have become too skeptical to be able to take innocent and enthusiastic delight” in this “sudden mutation,” this new caprice. “I do not really know at all what the enormous changes in the East signify or what will change in me, in my manner of writing, thinking, living.” “I am worried about the future of Europe”—as it happened, rightly so.

What he can do with his language is to continue to think and write, especially about writing and writers. “Writing demands solitude,” yet Zagajewski agrees with the conclusion Albert Camus came to, in one essay: Solitaire/Solidaire. Writing is “a tunnel leading to other people” (“even suicides write letters”). Poets can say something about the liberation of captive nations because “two contradictory elements meet in poetry: ecstasy and irony.” Ecstasy, the ardor which loves life, loves the world, “even what is cruel and absurd”; irony, “the artistic representation of thought, criticism, doubt.” Poetry encompasses these opposites. “No wonder almost no one read poems.” One poet whose poems are still read in Poland was Krzysztof Kamil Baczynski, a poet and soldier in the resistance to Nazi occupation, who died in the Warsaw Uprising of 1944. ” A legendary figure in Poland, he belongs to the pantheon of heroes who died young; he wrote love poetry. What would have become of this ardent soul had he survived, lived the rest of his life under the Communist regime? His contemporary, Wieslawa Szymborska, wrote a poem about that, one in which she imagines Baczynski as sixty years old, “a little gray, a little bald, and altogether ordinary.” He would have lived in a writers’ collective, a living arrangement that enabled the Communist Party to “control their minds, pens, and wallets.” Szymborska herself wrote poems in praise of the regime and its Soviet masters, early on, before repudiating it all and joining the dissidents. The collectivist regime, like all regimes, has a way of life. Under Communism, life of the writers’ collectives rob their inhabitants of intimacy by robbing them of their secrets. Others “find out everything” about you. They take everything away from you except what is trivial, ordinary. “Not what is universal will be revealed but what is trivial. This is how collectivism works: it kills with the ordinary, destroys what is individual.” Given this, “Baczynski was a darling of the gods—he died young.” 

On the other hand (there is always another hand, for Zagajewski), one finds writers like Paul Léautaud, the acerbic theater critic and diarist (his Journal Littéraire runs for half a century, most of it in the first half of the twentieth). He detested idealism to the extent of detesting ideas themselves, unlike most Poles—which is why he fascinates Zagajewski. Perhaps because humans entrance themselves with their ideas, he preferred animals to people. “Characterized by something I would call anti-deception,” his closest equivalent in English literature is Samuel Pepys, except that Léautaud has “literary awareness,” loving Stendhal and Chamfort. Lacking imagination, “he wrote down what really happened” in Parisian literary and theatrical circles. To him poetry was “only rhetoric, nothing more, and falseness, declamation.” But he was a poet in his own way, “a poet of low states of being.” Poets should read him, lest they fall into the rhetorical flights that often tempt them. Philosophers, too? “In an epoch dominated completely by Sartre and his pupils rang a voice that truly thought and felt differently, independently.” 

Guardian of Heaven’s Gate, St. Peter is another, if very different sort of reporter. In “Saint Peter’s Report,” Zagajewski gives him voice. Peter has noticed something about human beings, lately. “In our sphere we divide people into moralists and nihilists,” but he has begun to doubt this scheme of classification. The moralists who arrive at the Gate take “a tone that says it is all their due.” The nihilists “do not demand anything and fall asleep immediately,” knowing “that they are moving from one hell to another.” Peter has a confession to make to God. “Sometimes I switch rooms on them and send the nihilist to a room earmarked for one of the moralistic snobs.” Rather like what Zagajewski does with Léautaud.

A perfect example of what the poet John Keats called “negative capability,” the capacity to live “in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason,” was Gottfried Benn, whom Zagajewski calls “the inspired dermatologist”—a “great poet” and “also a doctor of skin and venereal diseases.” Keats’s example is Shakespeare, who ‘negated’ himself in his plays, entering into a world full of characters with views, thoughts, feelings, any of which might be, none of which need be, those of the poet who brings them on stage. This doesn’t preclude coherence of thought; it does insist on what philosophers call zeteticism, Plato’s and Xenophon’s Socrates being the first and perhaps best example. In a city, poets may be required to celebrate the regime, or at least be rewarded for celebrating it. (There may be regimes within a regime, as when a poet is rewarded by a civic association for inveighing against the city’s regime.) But in the life of the mind and heart, Socratic-philosophic or Keatsian-poetic, a more hesitant, but often more ardent way might prevail. 

Initially, Benn “champion[ed] the Third Reich,” largely in contempt for the hapless Weimar Republic it replaced. But it quickly transpired that “he was too serious, too sincere, too principled,” too steadfast in refusing to “betray his artistic allies” (rather as the writer in “Betrayal” does), men whom the Nazis deemed decadent, the expressionists. He wrote to a friend, “The whole thing is beginning to look more and more like a kitschy play constantly lauded as Faust.” His stance condemned Benn to “decades of isolation,” to a sense of “the radical dualism of poetry and the world.” Glancing at the phrase made famous by the novelist Gabriel Marquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude —Marquez, that foolish admirer of Communism—Zagajewski more realistically observes that “one hundred years of solitude happen only in novels”; “ten years of genuine, difficult solitude is an adequately severe sentence.” Exercising his negative capability, Zagajewski refuses to write an apologia for Benn as a man (“I do not know who he was”), but he can say he was a good doctor, “attending to the poorest prostitutes for free,” and “a poet true to himself,” intolerant of the ‘literary industry’ on which Léautaud viewed with such asperity. He loved the early Nietzsche, the Nietzsche of The Birth of Tragedy, rejecting “the late Nietzsche,” with “his theses about superman and about his ‘breeding.'” He “accused his spiritual master of having unsubstantiated faith in the possibility of human transformation,” knowing “with the bitter certainty of an aging poet that there would be no such evolution,” that “there exist two kingdoms, spirit and history, and there would be no exchange between them”—no Hegelian, Marxist, or (in Germany’s case) nationalist grand synthesis of them. 

Zagajewski concurs, to a point. “One can read [Benn’s] philosophy as a poem or as a philosophy,” and it has an initial effect of “spine-tingling rapture and anxiety.” Read “a bit more rationally, however, it is hard to avoid criticism.” Benn’s “spiritual radicalism possesses certain features in common with the thought of Heidegger and Ernst Jünger,” since in all of them the sharp division of history and poetry leaves history spiritually unrestrained, impossible to praise or criticize whether it becomes “habitable and human” or tyrannical. “It’s just like Heidegger’s (and Jünger’s) view of technology, which is regarded as responsible for all the ills of our era,” whereas “one must say that the tanks of General George Patton were more ‘humane’ than those of General Heinz Wilhelm Guderian.” Benn himself understood this, “at least from a practical standpoint,” preferring “the charms of good-natured American democracy” to “Russian totalitarianism,” after the war. But he “did not change his radical dualistic philosophy,” which would, if actually followed, make it “impossible to live and think.” His “extreme aestheticism,” his radical rejection of the political (‘totalitarian’ in its own way) led him to dismiss “the Greek understanding of man as a zoon politikon as a typically Balkan idea!” There was more to condemn in the Third Reich than its kitschiness. This is getting close to Alexey Tolstoy’s dismissal of death as a bourgeois illusion. Fortunately, Benn’s prose bespeaks “an unusual sobriety and frankness.” 

Zagajewski suggests that the two cities remain separate, but always maintain diplomatic relations with one another. Not necessarily as equal sovereigns: when the tension becomes too severe, the City of Spirituality ought to assert a rightful hegemony over the City of History. Attempts at unification, however, should be firmly resisted. Thinking of the matter in terms of language, tyrants like nouns and verbs, but the view adjectives with asperity. “For the adjective is the indispensable guarantor of the individuality of people and things.” (Adverbs, too, one assumes, since actions stand in as much need of qualification as things.) The tyrannical soul wants to level, cutting off all the poppies that grow taller than the rest. He wants a melon to be a melon to be a melon. And it is true that a melon is a melon. But it is also true that “there are no two melons alike.” Adjectives take note of that. “What color is to painting, the adjective is to language.” The adjective “lies on objects and people so lightly and always sees to it that the vivifying taste of individuality not be lost.” Ethics “wouldn’t survive a day without adjectives, beginning with good and evil. Nor would memory, as we do not remember a street ‘in the abstract’ but we do remember the street where we lived. 

Adjectives and adverbs qualify, and thereby resist quantification, massification. They do not deny the miracle of the common noun or its way of understanding natural things and persons, they enhance its miraculousness by calling attention to its mystery, the unknowability of Being with a capital ‘B.’ (The understanding of Being as God and God as a Person suggests this, too, and the complication of a three-Personed Person confirms that even more insistently.) Without the adjective, a noun would seem more simple than it is, including such nouns as ‘morality’ and ‘politics.’ Adjectives describe experience, which, Zagajewski contends, precedes innocence. By that, he means that “innocence is richer in experience but poorer in self-assurance.” Self-assurance tends to go too far. “In the end there is innocence, the bitter innocence of ignorance, despair, curiosity.” “Curiosity” is the last word of the book, a book that begins, lives, and ends by eschewing final solutions and sustaining ardor.